On May 5th, 1945, in the final days of World War II, something occurred that had never happened before and would never happen again.
American soldiers and German Vermach troops stood shoulderto-shoulder, defending the same ground against a common enemy.
This wasn’t a mistake or confusion in the fog of war.
It was a deliberate choice made by men who just days earlier had been trying to kill one another.
The battle lasted 12 hours.
When it was over, one German officer lay dead, killed while saving the life of a French civilian.
The Americans would honor his sacrifice in a way that broke every rule of conventional warfare.
This is the story of the Battle of Castle, the strangest battle of World War II.
To understand what happened on May 5th, we need to go back 2 years.
Castle sits in the Austrian Alps near the town of Veral in the Tur region.
Built in the 13th century, it had served many purposes over the centuries.
A fortress, a residence, even a hotel.
But in 1943, the Essis requisitioned it for a very specific purpose.
Castle it became a prison for what the Nazis called prominente.
High value prisoners who were too important to execute but too dangerous to set free.
These weren’t ordinary prisoners of war.
They were former leaders of France.
Men and women whose names had shaped European history.
Among them was Edoir Daladier who had been prime minister of France when the war began.
It was Daladier who had declared war on Germany in 1939 and who had signed the Munich agreement a year before that.
The Nazis hadn’t forgotten.
Paul Renault had succeeded Daladier as prime minister in 1940.
He had refused to surrender to Germany and had urged France to fight on.
For that defiance, he had been imprisoned since 1942.
Then there was Morris Gamlan, the French army’s commander-in-chief at the start of the war.
Regardless of how history would judge his decisions during the Battle of France, Gamlan had commanded millions of men.
The Germans knew his strategic mind, and they weren’t about to let him return to Allied hands.
Two former French premers were also held at it.
Leon Juo, a trade union leader and socialist who had opposed fascism for decades, and Francois de Larac, a right-wing politician who, despite his conservative credentials, had resisted the Nazi occupation and paid the price.
Perhaps the most unusual prisoner was Jean Baratra, one of the legendary four musketeers of French tennis.
He had won Wimbledon, the French Open, and been an international celebrity.
But Baratra had also been a military officer and had refused to collaborate with Vishy France.
His fame had protected him from execution, but not from imprisonment.
There were others, a French general, a trade unionist, wives and family members who had been imprisoned alongside their husbands.
Some had been held for years.
Some had watched their health deteriorate in captivity.
The castle was guarded by SS troops, but conditions were relatively tolerable compared to the camps.
The prisoners had rooms, not cells.
They could walk the grounds under supervision.
They received mail, though it was censored.
They played chess and talked late into the night about what would happen when the war ended, if they lived to see it.
But by the spring of 1945, everyone at Castle knew something was about to change.
The sound of artillery grew closer every day.
American forces were pushing through Bavaria.
Soviet armies were closing in from the east.
In Berlin, Adolf Hitler had taken his own life on April 30th.
The Reich was collapsing.
For the prisoners at ITA, this should have been a moment of hope.
Liberation was coming.
But they knew something else, too.
As the SS had retreated across Europe, they had been executing prisoners to prevent them from falling into Allied hands.
Massacres had been reported at camps across Germany and Austria.
The prisoners at a heard the rumors.
They knew they were valuable, and that made them targets.
The question wasn’t whether the Americans would arrive.
The question was whether they would arrive in time.
On May 3rd, 1945, the SS guards at Castle received new orders.
The castle was to be abandoned.
The guards were to withdraw and regroup with other SS units that were planning to make a last stand in the Alps, the so-called national redout that Nazi propaganda had been promoting.
But the order said nothing about the prisoners.
The SS commander at it, Oberumfurer Edward Viter, knew exactly what that meant.
He had previously commanded Dao concentration camp.
He knew how the SS dealt with loose ends, but Viter didn’t have the stomach for it.
On May 4th, he quietly left the castle with most of his guards.
He would die by his own hand the following day.
The remaining guards, sensing the end, simply deserted during the night.
By the morning of May 4th, Castle’s prisoners found themselves in the most dangerous kind of freedom.
They were unguarded but still trapped in a castle in the middle of a collapsing Reich with SS units roaming the countryside.
They needed help and they needed it fast.
One prisoner decided to act.
Andreas Crobot was a Czech electrician who had been imprisoned at for his resistance activities.
He knew the local area better than the anyone present at that moment.
On the morning of May 4th, he volunteered to slip out of the castle and try to find American forces.
Crobot made it to the nearby town of Veral, but he didn’t find Americans.
He found something even more unexpected.
Major Ysef Sep Gangal was an officer in the Vermacht, the regular German army, not the SS.
For the past few weeks, Gangal had been quietly working with the Austrian resistance in the Veral area.
He wasn’t a Nazi.
He never had been.
He had joined the army because that’s what young Austrian men did in the 1930s.
He had fought because that was his duty.
But by May 1945, Gangal had seen enough.
Germany had lost.
The war was over, and he was not going to spend the last days of his life following orders from a regime that no longer existed.
When Croat told Gangal about the prisoners at Castle, the major made a decision.
He would help them, but he knew he couldn’t do it alone.
He had only a handful of men, and there were reports of SS units in the area that were still looking for a fight.
Gangal sent Crowbot toward the American lines with a message.
High value prisoners needed immediate rescue at Castle Ita.
Then Gangal gathered his men, 14 Vermach soldiers, and headed for the castle himself.
When Gangal arrived at it, the French prisoners must have struggled to process what was happening.
A German officer was offering to protect them from other Germans.
Edoar Deladier, who had declared war on Germany 6 years earlier, shook hands with a Vermacht major.
They discussed defensive positions.
Meanwhile, Andreas Crobot had found the Americans.
Crobot’s journey led him to the town of Kustein, where he made contact with elements of the US 12th Armored Division.
He was eventually directed to a tank commander named Captain John C.
Jack Lee.
Lee was exactly the kind of officer you’d want in this situation.
He was aggressive, unconventional, and willing to take risks.
When Croat explained the situation, French VIPs trapped in a castle, SS units nearby, a Vermach officer requesting American help, Lee didn’t hesitate.
He scraped together a relief force, one M4 Sherman tank, one truck, 14 men, and whatever weapons they could carry.
It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
Lee’s small convoy rolled toward Castle on the afternoon of May 4th.
They linked up with Major Gangal in Veral and the two officers, one American, one German, sized each other up.
What do you say to a man who days earlier you would have killed on sight? How do you build trust when you’ve been trained to see each other as enemies? Whatever words passed between them, it was enough.
Lee and Gangal agreed to work together.
They would combine their forces, proceed to the castle, and hold it until reinforcements could arrive.
By the evening of May 4th, the most unusual garrison in military history had assembled at Castle Ita.
Captain Jack Lee commanded the American forces.
Major Yusf Gangal commanded the Vermac troops.
Former French prime ministers helped plan the defense.
A tennis champion took up a rifle.
A Sherman tank named Besotten Jenny was positioned to cover the castle’s main gate.
And then they waited.
The attack came at dawn on May 5th, 1945.
Between 100 and 150 Waffen SS troops approached Castle from the surrounding forest.
These weren’t regular soldiers looking to go home.
These were fanatics from the 17th SS Panza Grenadier Division.
Men who believed they were fighting for the survival of the Reich and who viewed the Vermacked soldiers at it as traitors deserving of execution.
The first shots were fired around 4:00 a.m.
The SS came from multiple directions, probing the defenses, testing for weak points.
Inside the castle, Captain Lee organized the defense.
The Americans and Vermached soldiers took up positions at windows and on the walls.
The French prisoners, despite Lee’s objections, insisted on helping.
Several of them took rifles and manned positions.
Jean Botra, the 46-year-old tennis star, proved to be one of the most valuable defenders.
His athletic conditioning and quick reflexes made him an effective rifleman, and his courage steadied the less militarily experienced prisoners.
The Sherman tank besotten Jenny became the lynch pin of the defense.
Its 75 mm gun could reach far into the forest, and the SS troops had no anti-tank weapons.
Every time the SS tried to mass for an assault, the tank would fire, scattering them back into the trees.
But around midday, disaster struck.
An soldier with a panzer, a German anti-tank weapon, managed to get close enough to fire.
The rocket hit Besotten Jenny’s gun barrel, disabling the main weapon.
The tank was now effectively useless.
The SS, sensing weakness, intensified their assault.
They pushed closer to the castle walls.
Ammunition was running low on both sides.
Major Gangal moved from position to position, directing fire, encouraging his men.
The Vermach soldiers and Americans fought side by side, covering each other, sharing ammunition.
It was during one of these moments, as Gangal was coordinating the defense near a window, that an SS snipers bullet found him.
Ysef Gangal was killed instantly.
The man who had chosen to fight against his own countrymen, who had risked everything to protect prisoners he had never met, died within sight of the liberation he had helped make possible.
In the chaos of the battle, someone had to keep the defense together.
that someone was John Baratra.
The tennis champion made a decision that seemed insane.
He would escape the castle, slip through the SS lines, and find American reinforcements.
It was suicide.
Except that Baratra was fast, faster than anyone had a right to be at 46 years old.
He vaulted over the castle wall, sprinted across open ground while bullets kicked up dirt around him, and disappeared into the forest.
The SS troops, shocked by his audacity, missed him entirely.
Bro made it to American lines.
He found elements of the 142nd Infantry Regiment and explained the situation.
A relief column was immediately dispatched.
Back at Castle Ita, the defenders were down to their last magazines of ammunition.
The SS were preparing for a final assault.
Captain Lee and the surviving Vermax soldiers made ready for hand-to-hand fighting.
And then they heard it, the sound of American trucks and armor approaching from the valley below.
The relief force arrived around 400 p.m.
The SS troops caught between the castle defenders and the approaching Americans broke contact and fled into the mountains.
The battle of Castle Ita was over.
In the immediate aftermath, the castle looked like what it was, a battlefield.
Bullet holes scarred the ancient walls.
Spent shell casings littered the courtyard.
The disabled Sherman tank sat silent near the gate.
The French prisoners were evacuated to safety.
Within days, they would be returned to France where they would resume their lives and their roles in postwar French politics.
Edoar Daladier would return to Parliament.
Paul Renault would serve in several government positions.
Jean Bhotra would return to tennis and live to be 95 years old.
But Joseph Gangal would not see any of it.
Captain Jackly insisted that Gangal be buried with full military honors.
This was virtually unprecedented.
An American officer demanding a ceremonial burial for an enemy soldier.
But Lee was adamant.
Gangal had died fighting alongside Americans.
He had died protecting the innocent.
He deserved to be honored as a hero.
The Vermacked soldiers who survived the battle were treated as friendly forces by the Americans.
Another extraordinary break from standard procedure.
They were not processed as prisoners of war.
Instead, they were allowed to return to their homes.
In the decades after the war, the people of Valle did not forget Ysef Gangal.
A street in the town was named in his honor.
A memorial was erected.
On the anniversary of his death, flowers are still laid at the site.
The Battle of Castle has been called the strangest battle of World War II.
And it’s not hard to see why.
In 12 hours of fighting, everything that defined the war in Europe, the lines between enemies, the certainty of sides, the bitterness of years of combat dissolved.
American soldiers trusted a German officer they had met hours before.
German soldiers died defending French prisoners from other Germans.
A French tennis star became a combat messenger.
And in the end, men who should have been enemies fought as brothers.
There’s a tendency when we talk about World War II to speak in absolutes, allied and axis, good and evil, heroes and villains.
And in the larger sense, those distinctions are valid and necessary.
But Castle reminds us that even in the darkest chapters of history, individual human beings make individual choices.
Ysef Gangal chose to risk everything to protect prisoners he had never met.
Jack Lee chose to trust a man who wore the uniform of his enemy and 14 Vermacht soldiers chose to stand with them.
The war in Europe would officially end 3 days later on May 8th, 1945.
But for the men at Castle, the war ended when Ysef Gangal fell.
When the last shot was fired in defense of something that transcended nations and armies, it ended when enemies became allies.
If only for one battle, if only for one day.
